Shqipëria as it is known in the ethnic language is better known by it’s English name Albania. For many years it was a country closed to foreigners but no longer. We visited for a week on a charter package holiday. As there is still (as far as I know) only one airport in the whole of the country we flew to Corfu then took a hydrofoil ferry across to Sarandë in the south west corner of the country just a short distance from the Greek border.

Hydrofoil ferry between Sarandë and Corfu

The name Sarandë means “forty” and is an abbreviation that comes from the full name of the monastery overlooking the town – the monastery of forty saints.

Apart from spending time on the beach and in the town we also took a couple of guided tours which gave us the opportunity to find some caches. Usually when we are on holiday we rent a car for a couple of days, but due to the very limited number of cache in the whole country (my pocket query gave me 77 caches including 1 event) and due to the fact that the closest ones were reachable on the tours, that was the way we decided to do our caching.

We were fortunate that just a few weeks prior to our vacation a new cache had been placed close to the hotel. Of course, after breakfast on the first morning we went out to find Santa Quaranta beach.

Santa Quaranta hotel as seen from the Santa Quaranta Beach cache

Apart from that there was just one more cache in the town (excluding an event to be held the day after we had gone home) and that was just 800 m away, but at the top of a hill that was only accessible by a steep winding road on the other side of the hill, a walk of some 3 or 4 km. Luckily one of our tours took us there.

Our first tour was to the World Heritage site of Butrint where there was both a traditional cache – Butrint and an earthcache Lake Butrint and Vivari Channel. I hunted and found the traditional cache as the guide was giving a talk in the Roman ampitheatre.

Our guide talking about the history of Butrint

The cache found at Butrint

The Lion gate. The old gate can be seen deeper in the wall

Butrint ruins. Different layers from different civilisations

The ancient site was amazing and we were very fortunate to have an excellent guide who was an English teacher and gave fantastically interesting information about where we were and also about the history of Albanian and what it was like to live during the harsh communist dictatorship that existed in the country after the second world war.

ds8300 in front of the Vivari Channel at Butrint

The earthcache gave a clear picture of how the area was formed geologically and the tour gave an insight into how important the place was in historical times.

Butrint’s devlopment through history

The tour continued back towards Sarendë and took us to Lëkurësi Castle for lunch. The “mushrooms” in the picture below are small bunkers that were built during the communist era and are just two of the more than 170,000 that were built throughout the country. The cache was hidden behind a patch of succulent cacti that managed to draw blood on both my arms and legs. The views from the castle were magnificent.

View over south Sarandë. Note the bunkers.

One of the 170000 bunkers built in Albania

Our second tour took us away from the coast and into one of the inland plains where the main focus was agriculture. The relatively rich county town of Gjirokaster with it’s castle was the goal of the tour along with a natural spring of huge dimensions called Blue Eye (Syri i kalter). I can’t have been thinking as I didn’t take my GPS with me and data over the cell network was exorbitantly expensive. Luckily I had read the cache description and looked at the spoiler picture so locating the place for the cache at Kalaja e Gjirokastres / Castle of Gjirokaster wasn’t too difficult. However, finding the cache was a different matter.

The bus dropped us in the market square where there was a fleet of taxis to take us the final kilometer up a steep narrow cobblestone road to the castle.

A fleet of taxis brought us up the hill to the castle

When I got to the cache location there was a young French woman feeling under the seat where the cache was supposed to be. Geocacher? was my question to which I got the answer Yes!. There were a couple of magnets under the seat but no cache. After a short hunt I found it in the breach of the cannon! We both signed the log then dropped the cache back into it’s hidey hole.

The cache at Gjirokaster

The cannon hiding the cache at Gjirokaster

The visit was followed by a taxi ride back down the hill to the birthplace of Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator who ruled the country for over four decades, then on to a big hotel in the market square for a five course lunch. Very tasty. The only thing they didn’t serve was coffee so after lunch we walked across the street to a small cafe to get our caffeine fix.

On the journey back to Sarendë over the mountain range we made a short detour up a very bumpy dirt track to the natural spring – Blue Eye with the associated earthcache SYRI I KALTER. The earthcache is a great source of information about how the spring was formed. A few brave souls took a swim in the clear 10 C water. Brrr!

Details about the Blue Eye (Syri I Kalter) spring

The spring Blue Eye (Syri I Kalter)

ds8300 at the Blue Eye

With our tours over so was our geocaching for the week so we could spend the remaining couple of days on the beach plus eating and drinking of course. It was possible to sit out in the evenings as it was still warm. One day a surprisingly large cruise ship stopped in the bay.

A couple of tasty Albanian pizzas

Sunset over Sarandë

A cruise ship outside Saradë

The vacation ended on a strange note. When we arrived at the airport at Kerkyra Kapodistrs on Corfu we were told that the plane was cancelled due to technical problems. It and it’s passengers were stranded in Parga, and there wouldn’t be a replacement plane until the next day. After the initial disappointment we learnt that we would be taken to a hotel for the night and dinner and breakfast would be provided. When we got to the hotel we found we had been given an “all inclusive” package so we felt much better about that. The dinner was excellent, but naturally the free wine was not of the best quality, but drinkable. We got home about 14 hours later than planned but it wasn’t a problem. I was pleased to arrive home during late afternoon instead of 2 am the same day.

Like this:

Once my trip to the Isle of Man and England was known to zelger, he suggested an outing close to his home with a group that he is involved in: WKMU3A. U3A is the abbreviation for University of the third age and is for active people who have retired. WKM is for Wokingham where most live. I am still working but my younger brother and his wife who form “zelger” are both retired. Go figure.

I was given a list of potential walking loops of about 5 km that ended at suitable eating and drinking establishements. One that caught my eye was north of Reading and was a series of 40 mystery caches. I looked at them and found about half to be doable. The rest I just gave up on. That meant I had a list of around twenty caches in nice woodland. However, mysteries are not something that zelger or the WKMU3A group are keen on so the idea was parked.

We arrived at Gatwick after an uneventful flight from Ronaldsway airport on the Isle of Man and took the direct train from Gatwick to Wokingham. It’s very convenient as it completely misses out on having to go into London. zelger had some things to sort out in the afternoon so he sent me off out on the BBC trail. Now, for me BBC stands for British Broadcasting Corporation, but in this case it meant Binfield Bridal Bicycle Circuit and consisted of a mixture of twenty six traditional, mystery and letterbox hybrid caches. zelger thought it was too complicated for them so they had parked it. I thought it was great fun. In the first two caches BBC#1 and #2 were laminated cards that gave the coordinates of BBC#3 and #4 which were mystery caches. Got it? All along the trail new coordinates were given so you are forced to follow the series in numerical order.

Spring had really arrived and it was great walking along the country lanes and bridal paths that the caches were placed along.

Country lane on BBC trail

I managed to get to BBC#8 which was a letterbox/hybrid cache before my time was up and I had to meet up with my brother again for the evening activities. In the middle of the trail were a couple of JJEF caches, The ATM cache and Bobbing Pot. Our plan for the following day was that with zelger and WKMU3A we would attempt a series of JJEF caches in the morning ending with lunch and that zelger (both members of the team) and I would do a further series in the afternoon.

We met up with three of the potential fourteen members of WKMU3A (not counting zelger who are also members) and started off for Rampant Rhododendron. When we got to GZ it looked as though a tornado had passed through the forest. Not a rhododendron in sight!

From there we moved on to The Green Hill No. 2 which was a block of wood hung up in a tree with a cable lock on it. There were letters carved on the wood that translated into the code for the lock. The look on everyones faces when they cracked the number at the first attempt was priceless.

Neat construction

The Green Hill No. 3 was equally well constructed. This was a wooden box with a similar kind of lock and a block of wood with numbers on it. It was necessary to divide a huge number with a smaller number to get the code for the lock. I was just pulling up my smartphone in order to work out the answer when one of the U3A team whisked up a calculator out of their bag. A calculator! I haven’t seen one for years!

Locked box

Still dazed by the sight of the calculator we moved on to the remaining caches in the series and The Green Hill No. 4 was even better than the previous three caches that we had found. A padlocked birdbox hanging in a tree had a nearby plastic tube containing the key. I won’t spoil the game by telling you how to get hold of the key but everyone was really wound up by the caches we had found. This was much better than a film canister in an ivy covered tree.

Cache hanging upper right, lock lower centre

We carried on and found a couple more caches by the same owner and DNF’d two more. Can you spot the last cache the group found?

Can you see the cache?

There was a lot of talk over lunch about the experience from the morning and how much fun it had been. So, after lunch both halves of zelger and I set off on the six caches that comrpised the Fifield Frolic series. The trail passed along open and not so open paths in the area. Again, there were no two caches that looked or functioned in same way and all were well made. They were placed four years ago and a lot of growth of the vegetation had occured making some of them a little more well hidden than they would have been when placed.

Overgrown paths

After a full day of JJEF caches we had a quiet evening and spent the Friday morning sorting out the TB’s and geocoins we had found before moving off north towards Sonning Common and FamousEccles Favourite Forty mystery caches!

Typical FF40 beechwood cache

The puzzles I could solve were fun and the caches were located in a beech forest which luckily was still in it’s winter overcoat with little undergrowth. It will be a different story in a few weeks time. As we followed the paths an animal jumped across the path ahead of us. Was it a deer? Or a dog? It ran over to another of it’s kind and I learnt then that it was a muntjac. It’s an Indian deer that is proliferating at a great rate in England and is now quite a pest. I took a photo but it’s not worth publishing.

We also saw other wild animals including this golden pheasant and a rabbit. They didn’t seem to mind each others company.

Golden Pheasant and rabbit

So the day ended with a visit to my brothers daughter and grandson on the way to catching a train to Heathrow and the flight home. The following days were spent logging over a hundred caches and a dozen or more TB’s plus updating my blog. Phew!

Like this:

After the previous day’s walk from Douglas to Peel, which the GPS tracklog showed us to have been just over 25 km we decided to have a lazy day. The island is known for it’s working museum transport so we walked up to the Electric Tram terminus at the north end of the promenade where we parted with £16 for a day pass on the Manx transportation system. That included travelling on modern buses, the electric trams, horse drawn trams and steam trains. We had already travelled by bus a couple of times and liked the £2:70 single fares.

There are in principle two electric tram lines. The first runs between Douglas and Ramsey in the north and the second runs from Laxey, half way between Douglas and Ramsey, to the top of Snaefell (621 m). The steam trains run from Douglas to Port Erin at the south end of the island. The horse drawn trams run along the promenade from the Electric Tram terminus.

Electric tram at Douglas terminal

Interior of restored tram

A tram pulled into the terminus as we were buying our day passes and a few minutes later we were aboad. It didn’t take long before the tram was full. Not bad for a cold day in April. I wonder what it will be like in summer when that tourist season is in full swing?

We set off at a moderate speed following and crossing back and forth the road to Laxey. The trams are much slower than the usual traffic but have precedence at the road crossings. At Groudle Glen we noted that there was a private Victorian 2ft narrow gauge railway that covered a kilometer or so up the glen. When we arrived at Laxey we got of the tram and got on a waiting tram that is specially built for the steeper incline up to the summit of Snaefell. The route is characterised by having a third central rail that allows a mechanical grip type brake to operate in case the normal motor brake fails.

As we moved out of Laxey we saw the famous Laxey wheel. This is a 22 m diameter water wheel built in 1854 to pump up water from the 460 m deep lead mine (now disused) and still in operation. Signs of mining were seen further up the valley.

Water wheel at Laxey

The wheel at Laxey

Remains of old lead mine

At Snaefell summit we jumped off the tram and rushed up and over the remaining few meters to get to the Six Kingdoms cache so we could get back onto the tram that started it’s downward journey in 30 minutes. It was blowing hard and zelger and I were both pleased that we had hats and gloves with us. Of, course as a radio amateur the masts were of interest and I had listened to traffic on and tried to activate GB3GD and GB3IM-S without success on our walk between Douglas and Peel.

ds8300 at Six Kingdoms

The Snaefell tram at the summit terminus

After spending some minutes at the earthcache twoofnine (two of nine) we jumped back on the tram and rolled back down into Laxey.

View from the journey up Snaefell

On the way down. Note the rope safety brake!

After a few minutes the tram to Douglas appeared and we made our way leisurely back into the main town.

View of Douglas bay from the north

We had intended to take the horse drawn tram along the Promenade but the next tram was too late for us to get to the railway station for our next leg of our travels, so we jumped on a regular bus that wisked us away towards the station. We got off a few stops earlier to log the virtual cache NOW I AM ON MY OWN.

At the station we had just enough time for a quick cup of coffee. We bumped into Steinmann, a geocacher (and radio amateur) from Germany that we had met a couple of days previously at the Meet a Swede event.

Steam train to Port Erin at Douglas Station

No 13 Kissack

ds8300 travelling first class

We chose a first class carriage and enjoyed the leisurely journey into Port Erin. We had time for a short walk (no geocaches in sight) and a pint in the pub opposite the station before making our way back.

Port Erin

Some kilometers out of Port Erin we stopped to swap locomotives with the train coming from Douglas. It seems that loco No13 (Kissack) lives in Port Erin and No 8 (Fenella) in Douglas.

Changing locos

No 8 Fenella

Upon arrival in Douglas we set off towards Manx the islands oldest geocache.

We finished off our geocaching with The Isle of Man’s Shortest Multi-cache which wasn’t easy to locate but when zelger triumphantly fished it up from it’s hiding place we both had a laugh. I won’t post any spoiler, but it’s on my list of caches to copy.

So after an evening meal at the same location we used for the event we went back to the hotel and packed ready for the early morning plane to Gatwick and more geocaching adventures.

The last time I visited the Isle of Man was in 1964 and the railways were still in operation. Fast forward to 2016 and I had the notion that I would like to revisit the island and add another geocaching country to my list. I mentioned this to my brother who is half of team “zelger” and he said that this would be a great opportunity for a “lads reunion”. Anyway, time passed and nothing materialised due to everyone having commitments. Finally, in March 2017 I raised the idea again and booked my tickets for Easter 2017. Half of zelger decided that this was not an opportunity to be missed and booked tickets too.

The aim of the trip was twofold. Walk the Heritage Power Trail in a day and spend a day of nostalgia on the electric trams and steam trains on a second day. While we were at it I threw in a geocaching event so we could meet some of the local geocachers. A friendly bunch they were too. The event was Meet a Swede, which isn’t quite a lie as I have dual nationality. Teamkiisseli from Finland were relieved that they were able to speak English not Swedish and didn’t need to discuss ice-hockey.

The Heritage Power Trail crosses the Isle of Man from Douglas in the east to Peel in the west. There are other trails as well but this one seemed to be the definite trail and also gave us the chance to brag that we had walked across the island. After a hearty but early breakfast at our hotel we made our way through Douglas to the start of the trail. Well actually, the end of the trail. Number 1 is in Peel and the last one, number 79 is in Douglas. I had been watching the weather forecast for a few days and it seemed as though we may be in for a wet day. Apart from some light rain early on we had no problems. The sky remained cloudy most of the day but cleared up for a while in the afternoon. There were several information boards along the trail. This was close to Douglas.

Steam Heritage Trail – Douglas to Peel

Our walk together with lunch and a couple of other diversions took all day but was worth it as it gave a nice string of smilies right across the island.

Heritage Power Trail – done in a day!

The majority of the caches were micros, either film canisters placed in nifty little wire baskets on trees and fence post or PET preforms. A few of the caches were larger, notably the TB hotel, the letterbox and the bonus cache.

Bonus cache

Of course, as the trail follows a disused railway line there are no really tough gradients. I think that the highest point we reached was 49 m asl. There were various remains from the days of the active railway, amongst them a couple of rusty bridges like this one.

A rail bridge across a river

The old station at Union Mills has gone along with all the track but there are details available on line for those interested.

Maps of the trail at Union Mills

Historical railway crane at Union Mill

After the third run of micros it was great to find the TB hotel. There was a TB in the box that we picked up and took with us along the trail.

zelger extracting a TB from the trail’s TB hotel

Even though it was overcast and only about 8 degrees C spring was still well on it’s way and there were flowers of all kinds along the trail. These were just some of them.

Plenty of flowers along the trail

Needless to say we were pleased to get to HPT #24 at Tynwald Hill so that we could get lunch. We got there a couple of hours later than expected but a couple of pints of beer to replenish our fluids and a hearty Manx cheese sandwich put us back in good spirits. I had originally planned to find a handful of caches at Tynwald Hill but decided to skip them as we were running late. Tynwald is also the name of the legislature for the island of Ellan Vannin (Isle of Man).

As we neared Peel the track followed the River Neb and the scenery changed somewhat. There was plenty of bird life including this heron.

Heron and mill wheel

Heron

After the intial difficulty we had finding HPT #76 the rest of the caches were easily found, until we got to Peel that is. HPT #2 was located at a sign but we couldn’t see anything. As we were searching we heard a voice. “Are you looking for the geocache? It’s in the …” It was a local guy getting something out of a nearby parked car. He saved our day. He had probably given the same hint to others before us too.

Peel Harbour

As we arrived at Peel Harbour we just had HPT #1 to find and that was a nano under a bench. Of course there were four people sitting there but we HAD to find that cache so we told them what we were doing and suddenly there were six people on their hands and knees searching for the cache. We found it after a rather long search much to our relief. All that remained was to get the bus back to Douglas. We had to wait an hour as it was Easter Monday and the busses were not running the regular weekday service. Once on the bus we were back in Douglas ready for dinner in just over half an hour.

Like this:

What could be better than a break from the Swedish winter with a holiday abroad? Somewhere where there was some sun and warmth? A few years ago (2014) we had a weeks holiday on Lanzarote in February and were disappointed by the cool weather (about 15C) that we had. This time we chose Tenerife with a definite geocaching goal in mind and that was to find a cache at a higher altitude than my previous record which is somewhere just under 3000 m. We were not disappointed with the weather either. Every day was between 25 -30 C in the shade due to hot winds blowing in from Africa. I saw that the week after we were there that the temperatures had dropped to around 15C so we were very lucky.

We stayed in Puerto de la Cruz on the northern coast of the island and didn’t find the bus transfer from the airport in the south to be a problem. It gave us some free sightseeing and a feel for what the island looked like. Our arrival day (Sunday) was used to install us in the hotel and eat dinner so no geocaching was on the cards. In fact, with the exception of the cache on Teide there was no real pressure to find caches.

There are not so very many caches in the town but there were a couple that had a high number of favourite points so I made a not of those as potential places to visit. The first cache find was a few hundred metres from the hotel Mirador la Paz which gave us a great view out over the town and the pools at Martianez. From there we walked across town as far as Castillo de San Felipe before returning back to the hotel.

View from Mirador la Paz

Castillo de San Felipe

Tracklog from 20170306 – Walk around Puerto de la Cruz

I had read that there were many walking tracks on the island and on the Tuesday after visiting the botanical gardens we started a walk up the hill towards La Orotava, This was a neat little climb of 337 meters in just over 3 km so a break at Vati was welcomed. The reward for reaching La Orotava was a great tapas lunch.

La Orotrava, a small town 4km up the hill from Puerto de la Cruz

Tracklog from 20170307 – La Orotrava

To get to Teide there are several choices, the easy ones being to rent a car or take a guided tour by bus. As I had just had a shoulder operation driving was out of the question so we took the guided bus tour. That meant missing out on a lot of caches (mostly eathcaches to my big disappointment) along the route but it did get us to the top cable car station on Teide. That was at 3500+ meters. To get to the peak you need a special permit and there were none available for the next couple of months and organised tours with the permit included are only on Sundays which didn’t allow us to take that choice. I thought I wasn’t going to find the micro Mount Teide (3528 m.a.s.l) amongst all the rocks by the path so was very relieved when I did. The second cache Pico del Teide eluded me (and a few others even though it was apparently found the same day I was there.

The Teide volcano as seen from Mirador de la Ruleta

The cable car at Teide takes you up over 1000 m in just a few minutes

The slope up Teide is getting close to 45 degrees. I’m glad there was a cable car!

Thursday was a lazy day but on Friday we made a 17 km walk along part of the “Ramblas de Castro”, a costal walkway. I would of liked to walk further but the temperature was over 30C so we decided it was not such a good idea without more training first. On the way to the entrance of the walkway we passed through town and found a couple of traditionals, Tree of Life #8 and Loro Parque where I picked up a couple of travelbugs to take back to Sweden.

A cache with TB’s at Loro Parque

When we reached the nature reserve that Ramblas de Castro passes through the first cache on my list was Pirates Treasure / Piratenschatz which by the description and number of favourite points was a fun cache. It was housed in an old deserted water tunnel of which there are thousands on the island. I was expecting a bit of a crawl but I only needed to go in a dozen or so metres before finding the cache. Nice one for kids actually. At about the same place it was possible to log the earthcache EC Erosion at Work and take a few photos.

The coast at Ramblas de Castro

From here we continued on to the island’s cache with the most favourite points – El Gordo (Lost Place). I love both Urban Exploration (UE) and Industrial Architecture and this cache hit the spot. I would have loved to go down to the building but the area was fenced off.

ds8300 with El Gordo (The lost place) in the background

Fascinating old ruins at El Gordo (The lost place)

The locked gate at the top of the path down to El Gordo (The lost place)

The lost place as seen from the locked gate

Tracklog from 20170310 – Ramblas de Castro

I found a couple more caches during the week but all in all, we had a lazy time and recharged our batteries in the best possible manner.

Like this:

Every year I set targets for my geocaching activities but am finding it more difficult as the years pass. In the early days it was just a case of finding caches for fun. There weren’t so many which meant that whereever I was it was easy to hunt for the handful of caches that there were. As geocaching has expanded both in terms of active caches and active players and through a massive technology development with the ingress of smartphones and a plethora of geocaching apps (some good and some not so good), I have needed to filter out what I will look for. I hate all the poorly presented throw down micros that dominate the game these days. Rant over and back to my goals for 2016 and how well I did.

Targets and result at the end of 20161. Find at least one cache in Norrland.
In August 2015 I made a trip to Umeå and the boroughs on the way where I had previously not found a cache and when I got there had a thought about continuing north into the county of Norrland. When I saw the additional distance I would need to drive and the time available I decided to give it a miss. I still haven’t made it. FAIL

2. Find at least one cache in 10 new boroughs of Sweden
Of the 400 + caches I found in Sweden the furthest from home was just 130 km away so none were in a new borough. FAIL

4. Find at least 10 more earthcaches
2016 was a great year for earthcaches and I found thirty six in total; one in UAE, twenty two on Iceland, five in and around Krakow, Poland, two in London, which we visited together with Jersey and Guernsey and five in Sweden, one of which was on International Earthcache Day. PASS

5. Place at least 3 new caches with different D/T ratings or types
I have built a handful of “gadget” and otherwise camoflagued caches that are still lying on my workbench in the garage. All ready for placement, but I have been too lazy busy to place them in the wild. FAIL

6. Find puzzle caches to complete the A-Z, 0-9 owner challenge.
When I looked at my GSAK stats for 2016 I thought there was a mistake. I found a mere eleven mysts during the year. I have said before that these are not my favourite types of caches but eleven? That’s terrible. I still have three owner name letters and four owner name numbers to find. Not a single one of them ticked off from 2105. BIG FAIL

7. Find ten new D/T combinations for puzzle caches.
From the eleven found mysts in 2016 none of them had a D/T rating that I was missing. FAIL

So, seven targets, TWO passes and FIVE fails. Am I unhappy with the result? Absolutely not as each of the trips abroad more than compensated for not getting up to the North of Sweden and placing new caches is just a day’s work if I set my mind to it. The disappointment I may feel (I don’t) was regarding my targets set around mystery caches. It’s now 2017 and I have new targets that are soon to be revealed.

The ferry journey from St Helier, Jersey to St Peter Port on Guernsey only took an hour but it was enough time to enjoy a quick lunch onboard. We could see coming into port that St Peter Port was much smaller than St Helier and had a much steeper profile. We found out how steep as we walked up from the ferry with our luggage, which luckily was wheeled. We stopped on the way to find Dandilly’s Wedding series: The Transport but the DVD case that was the cache container had slid into it’s hiding slot and needed a revisit with appropriate tools to extract it.

View of St Peter Porting from the Jersey ferry

After puffing up the hill and checking into our hotel we decided to do some exploring and walked the kilometer or so down to town. We were pretty close to Rooftop View but there was just a slight hinder. We had to walk back up 126 steep steps to get there. Phew!

View over St Peter Port from “Rooftop View”

After a great evening meal we walked back up to the hotel. The morning after started with drizzle that turned into rain so by the time we got to the bus terminus we were rather wet. Because of the poor weather we jumped on a 91 bus and for the princely sum of £1 each we had a two hour round island trip. On the way we saw the sign to Little Chapel so once we got back to the bus terminus we forked out another pound to get the bus there. We were so interested in the chapel I forgot to look for the cache that was there. Looking at the clue I am certain I was just within centimeters of the cache. Duh!

Entering the Little Chapel

Inside the Little Chapel

Detail on the wall of the “Little Chapel”

The weather cleared up and when we got back to St Peter Port we started to look for Twixt. Not as easy as it should have been. There was a protest meeting in the park – something about building a car park there – so we waited until they were done beforestarting our hunt. The GPS pointed me just inside the park boundary and then outside it. We walked round the block before discovering a small path three quarters of the way round. Once we were in the right spot the cache was an easy find.

A protest meeting delayed our search for “Twixt”

Beautiful hanging baskets were everywhere

We paid a visit to Victor Hugo’s home which is now a museum. What a strange taste that man had, dark and egocentric. We passed by this interesting sign.

We couldn’t find a cache in La Cache

We also had the opportunity to watch some of the soap box derby which was quite fun. No-one got hurt but a few of the “cars” got damaged and lost wheels on the way down over the ramps.

Soap box derby in St Peter Port

Our final cache find in my forty fourth caching country was at Victoria Tower which you can see to the right of the first photograph above.

Victoria tower and a captured German field gun

Both Guernsey and Jersey are very different. Guernsey felt a bit too small and compact for my liking but it was great to have visited both the islands. We stayed in London for a couple of days on our way home but did no active geocaching. Food poisoning in London had me decked for the last four days of my vacation then it was work again. With the exception of an hour’s geocaching in Sweden after our trip to Iceland I haven’t done any during the vacation. I had great plans but the result of the food poisoning put paid to those. I wonder where our next trip will be?